Portable selective call receivers having voice storage capability have been limited in the number and length of voice messages that can be stored at once due to memory size and battery life considerations. Such selective call receivers also have incorporated a feature that allows a user to "lock" selected messages that the user considers important, so that the locked messages will not be overwritten by new incoming messages.
A problem that can occur when a user has many locked messages is that there can be insufficient memory available for storing a new incoming message. Recently introduced selective call transceivers, i.e., acknowledge-back pagers, can communicate to a fixed portion of a selective call communication system that there is insufficient memory for receiving a particular message. Unfortunately, such communications alone do not enable the user to receive the message without unlocking and overwriting a locked message, which the user may not wish to do.
Thus, what is needed is a method and apparatus that allows the user to receive a voice message without unlocking a locked message when there is insufficient memory space available in the selective call transceiver for storing the voice message.